“Designing CSS Layouts for the Flexible Web”
Despite the Web’s flexible, user-controlled nature, many designers continue to create rigid layouts that don’t adapt well to the myriad of user settings like screen resolution and font size. In this session, we’ll explore the benefits and challenges of both liquid and elastic layouts. You’ll learn how to design for flexible layouts through numerous visual examples of both real and mocked-up Web sites. We’ll examine several interface design conventions that don’t work well for flexible layouts and learn how to transform each to be more flexible-friendly, while still keeping the aesthetics of the site intact. You’ll leave the session with a list of things to watch out for while creating your next design comps, as well as ideas for how to tweak the designs of even fixed-width layouts to adapt better to user-controlled font sizes and other flexible Web conditions, making your CSS building process a lot less painful and your finished sites a lot more robust.
